Heartwood (28 page)

The truth was I had no legal solutions for the problems they brought to me. Wilbur had admitted to stealing the historical watch from Earl Deitrich’s home office, and hence by implication the bearer bonds, and Kippy Jo had methodically drilled a pistol round in each of Bubba Grimes’s eyes. Unless I could bring down Earl Deitrich, there was a good chance both Kippy Jo and Wilbur would go into the system.

Lucas had been stand-up when it counted and had succeeded in putting himself right between the gangbangers and the East Enders. How do you tell a kid that honor has its price and that his father had rather it not be paid?

I felt my palms tighten on the steering wheel. I wanted to hold L.Q. Navarro’s heavy .45 revolver in my hand. I wanted to feel the coolness of its surfaces against my skin and open the loading gate and rotate the cylinder inside the frame and watch the thick, round base of the brass cartridges tick by one at a time. I wanted to feel the knurled spur on the hammer under my thumb and hear the cylinder lock hard and stiffly into place.

L.Q. and I raided deep into Coahuila and killed drug transporters and set their huts ablaze and watched their tar, reefer, and coke flame like white gas against the sky. In that moment all the moral complexities disappeared. There was no paperwork to be done, no rage over our inability to reconcile feelings with legality. Sometimes we would find the dead several nights later, still unburied
and exposed in the moonlight, their skin glowing like tallow that has melted and cooled again. I had no more feeling about them than I would have about bags of fertilizer.

The trade-off came later, when I fired blindly up an arroyo and watched sparks fly into the darkness and L.Q. Navarro fling his hands at the sky and tumble toward me.

Brave people kept the fire in their belly out of their heads. Reckless and self-indulgent ones let someone else pay their dues.

The inside of the car seemed filled with a fragrance of roses. My thoughts bunched and writhed like snakes inside a black basket.

Lucas was sitting on the collapsed tailgate of his pickup in my driveway when I got home. He took off his straw hat and slapped the dust off the spot next to him. Every light in the downstairs of my house was on.

“My office is open. Have a seat,” he said.

“You look mighty confident this evening.”

“After the show Peggy Jean Deitrich told me to give you a message. I wrote it down. ‘No matter how all this works out, I hold you in high regard.’ She blows hot and cold, don’t she?”

“You could say that.”

“She’s a pretty thing, I tell you that,” he said.

I sat down on the tailgate next to him. “Where we going with this?” I asked.

“You remember her the way she used to be, then you see her the way she is now. It’s like you’re caught between the woman who’s there and the woman who ain’t but should be.”

“Yes?”

“It’s like living in two worlds. Puts a hatchet right in
the middle of your head, don’t it? In the meantime, you don’t need to hear bad shit about people you care for.”

“Let me see if I can figure this out. You don’t want me pestering you about Esmeralda again?”

“I wish I had your smarts.”

“Can you tell me why all the lights are on in my house?”

“Esmeralda is cooking up a monster-big Mexican dinner for us. Enchiladas, tacos, refried beans, chili con queso, she done put the whole garbage can in it.”

The moon was yellow over the hills, and in the softness of the light I could see his mother’s looks in his face. I cupped my hand on the back of his neck and felt the close-cropped stiffness of his hair against my palm. I saw his embarrassment steal into his face and I took my hand away.

“I bet that’s one fierce Mexican dinner. We’d better go eat it,” I said.

It rained in the middle of the night and my bedroom curtains flapped and twisted in the wind and in the distance lightning forked into the long green velvet roll of the hills.

L.Q. Navarro sat in my stuffed burgundy chair by the bookshelf, his legs crossed, his Stetson resting on the tip of his boot. He was reading from a leather-bound, musty volume about the Texas Revolution, turning each page carefully with his full hand.

“How’s it hangin’, L.Q.?”
I asked.

“You
know how Sam Houston beat Santa Anna? He sent Deaf Smith behind Santa Anna’s army and had him cut down Vince’s Bridge with an ax. Once the battle started, there wasn’t no way out for any of them.”

“I’m awful tired, L.Q.”

“Sometimes you got to be willing to lose it all. They’ll see it in your eyes. It tends to give them a religious moment.”

“I’ll beat Earl Deitrich in the courtroom.”

“His kind own the courts. You’re a visitor there, Billy Bob. He fired a gun into the side of his head. You got to admit that was impressive.”

“How about taking the Brown Mule out of your mouth?”

“He took Peggy Jean Murphy from you. He durn near killed you with poison. He corrupts everything he touches. Rope-drag him, pop a cap on him, hang his lights on a cactus. I don’t like to see what he’s doing to you.”

“I don’t live in that world anymore.”

He raised one eyebrow at me over his book, then closed the book in disgust and walked out of the room, the rowels of his spurs tinkling on the hardwood floor.

“L.Q.?”
I said.

Tuesday morning Temple Carrol came into my office and closed off the glare of sunlight through the blinds and sat down in front of my desk and opened a notepad on her crossed knee. There was a red abrasion at the corner of her left eye, and the eye kept leaking on her skin so that she had to dab at it with a Kleenex.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I found this ex-con boxer, Johnny Krause, at a pool hall in San Antone yesterday,” she replied. “He stuck a pool cue in my eye.”

“You went there by yourself?”

“He said he was sorry. He was just nervous around class broads in pool rooms. You want to hear what I have or not?” she said.

She ran through the material in her notebook. Krause had been picked up and questioned in the death of Cholo Ramirez and let go. He drove a cement mixer on
and off for a construction company, rented a farmhouse behind a water-bed motel on the outskirts of San Antonio, and spent most of his downtime in Mexico.

“Dope?” I said.

“He draws compo and drives a new Lincoln,” Temple said.

“Where’s our pool shooter now?” I asked.

We crossed the border at Piedras Negras and drove down into the state of Coahuila. The sun was hazy and red on the horizon now, and the poplar trees planted along the road were dark green, almost blue, in the dusk. We continued south of Zaragoza and crossed a river dotted with islands that had willow trees on them, then we saw a long baked plain and hills in the distance and a whitewashed village that spilled down an incline to a brown lake. The water in the lake had receded from the banks and left the hollow-socketed skeletons of carp in the skin of dried mud that covered the flats.

A Mexican cop nicknamed Redfish by the Bexar County sheriff’s department, for whom he was a drug informant, waited for us in the backseat of a taxi parked in the small plaza in the center of the village. He had jowls like a pig, narrow shoulders, wide hips, and sideburns that fanned out like greasepaint on his cheeks. He wore yellow shades and a mauve-colored flop-brim bush hat, probably to detract from his complexion, which was deeply pocked, as though insects had burrowed into the flesh and eaten holes in it.

“I had to hire my cousin to drive me ’cause we didn’t have no official cars free today. He’s gonna need twenty-five dollars for his time,” Redfish said.

“Yeah, I can see he probably gave up a lot of fares this
afternoon. Tourists flying in for the water sports and that sort of thing,” Temple said.

“Your friend at the Bexar sheriff’s office? He said you got a hard nose. We don’t got no tourists now. But in winter we got
gringos
from Louisiana kill ducks all over that lake. They shoot three or four hundred in a morning. What you think of that?” Redfish said.

“We think we need to talk to Johnny Krause,” I said.

“You was a Texas Ranger?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“One thing to remember here. He ain’t been in no trouble in Mexico. He leaves a lot of money in the village. ’cause he’s a countryman don’t mean he gets treated without respect.”

The wind shifted and Temple’s face jerked as though it had been struck. “What’s in that lake?” she said.

“Everything from the houses runs downhill here. It don’t stink after the rains. The
gringos
come here for the ducks after the rains. They’re real proud, drinking wine in the cafe and eating all their ducks,” Redfish said.

Redfish got in the front seat of the Avalon with me, and Temple sat in back. The sun was an ember on the horizon when we drove deeper into the village and out onto a chiseled rock road above the lake. Caves or old mine shafts were cut back into the hill, and people were living in them. They washed their clothes in the lake and dried them on the rocks around the caves, and cooked their food in pots that gave off an odor like burning garbage. I saw no men, only women and children, their faces smeared with soot, the color of their hair impossible to define.

“They’re
gitanos
. They fix dishes with chicken guts.
They steal them out of hog pens. You can’t do nothing for them,” Redfish said.

“Where are the men?” Temple asked.

“A bunch of them got in a fight with knives. The
jefe
got them out at his ranch for a while. Look,
señorita
, this is a house of
puta
. Maybe it ain’t good you go in there,” he said.

“I’ll try not to have impure thoughts,” Temple said.

“Johnny Krause ain’t grown up inside, know what I mean?” Redfish said to me.

“No,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Temple said, leaning forward on the seat.

“All the
gitanos
ain’t just up in them caves or out at the
jefes
ranch,” he said, and looked out the window at the dusty surface of the lake.

At the end of the road beveled out of the hill was a whitewashed building that had probably been a powder house for a mining company and possibly later a jail. The walls were stone, the windows inset with bars, the roof covered with wood poles and tin and mounds of dirt that had sprouted grass. The casement of the front door was steel, bolted into the stone, and the door itself, which hung partially open, was cast iron and painted red. The paint was incised with every possible lewd depiction of human genitalia.

The bar and floor were made of rough-planed raw pine scorched by cigarette and cigar butts. The interior was bright with a greasy light from oil lamps, and the smoke on the ceiling was so thick it churned in gobs when someone walked under it. The faces of the customers were besotted and inflamed, their teeth rotted, their skin unnaturally lucent, like lemon rind. A child went in and out of the back door, emptying cuspidors
and returning them to the bar and tables. Through the back windows and the open door I could see three pole sheds with burlap curtains hung from the roofs. Under the bottom of the curtains were slop jars and wash pans and the legs of either beds or cots.

“This is hard to take,” Temple said.

“It’s all right to wait outside,” I said.

“I’m talking about
that
right over there,” she replied.

A dark-skinned girl not more than thirteen sat at a table with Johnny Krause. She wore a shift and a faded peasant dress that fit her hips like a sack. On her feet were blue cotton socks that had worked their way down on her ankles and old sandals whose straps were pulled sideways on the soles. Her cheeks were rouged, her mouth lipsticked, and she had braided her hair with glass beads. Her underarm hair looked like it had been touched there by a brush, her small teeth yellow-tinged with early decay. Johnny Krause put his hand on top of hers.

He removed it when he saw us, but not out of embarrassment. His grin stayed in place, his concentration shifting only out of momentary necessity.

“Remember us?” I said.

“Why not? You keep showing up. How’s your eye, doll?”

He had pulled his brilliantined hair into a small matador’s point in back and fixed it with a rubber band. He grinned at the girl and moved his eyes to the bar and gestured slightly with his head. After she was gone, he lifted a jigger of dark rum by the rim with two fingers and drank from it as though he were tilting a miniature bucket into his mouth. Then he drank from a bottle of Dos Equis and smiled pleasantly at us.

“Her folks are gypsies. They run off on her,” he said.

“You did Cholo Ramirez for Earl Deitrich. I suspect this ex-merc, Fletcher whatever, hired you. Earl’s going down, Johnny. When he does, the guy who’s first in line doesn’t have to do the chemical nap,” I said.

“That’s too bad about that kid Ramirez. The cops talked to me about it. But he was a gluehead, a street mutt, a hype, and a genuine crazoid. If his brains run out his nose, it’s because he pulled the chewing gum out of his nostrils. I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

I sat down across from him. A box of kitchen matches was stuck in a ceramic holder in the middle of the table. He took one out and struck it on the striker and lit a cheroot cigar. The smoke was like wet leaves burning and maple syrup warming on a stove. The girl returned from the bar and lay her arm across his shoulders and let her thigh touch his arm, her face pouting. He whispered in her ear, then touched the small of her back with his fingers and nodded toward the bar. As she walked away his fingers trailed off lightly on the top of her rump.

“You must have been poured out of your mother’s colostomy bag, Krause,” I said.

He laughed. His skin was olive-toned and smooth, dry and cool as the surface of a clay pot, as though his glands were incapable of secretion. “You trying to get me to do scut work for you, like drop the dime on somebody, and you call me names? That’s why you come all the way down here?”

“No,” I said.